Page:Pastoral Letter Promulgating the Jubilee - Spalding.djvu/39

Rh confusion both religious and political affairs, to destroy the good order of society, and to annihilate all Divine and human rights, have always exerted all their criminal schemes, attention, and efforts upon the manner in which they might, above all, deprave and delude unthinking youth, as We have already shown: it is upon the corruption of youth that they place all their hopes. Thus they never cease to attack by every method the Clergy, both secular and regular, from whom, as testify to us in so conspicuous a manner the most certain records of history, such considerable benefits have been bestowed in abundance upon Christian and Civil Society and upon the republic of Letters; asserting of the Clergy in general, that they are the enemies of the useful sciences, of progress, and of civilization, and that they ought to be deprived of all participation in the work of teaching and training the young.

Others, reviving the depraved fictions of innovators, errors many times condemned, presume, with extraordinary impudence, to subordinate the authority of the Church and of this Apostolic See, conferred upon it by Christ Our Lord, to the judgment of civil authority, and to deny all the rights of this same Church and this See with regard to those things which appertain to the secular order. For these persons do not blush to affirm, "that the laws of the Church do not bind the conscience, if they are not promulgated by the civil power; that the acts and decrees of the Roman Pontiffs concerning religion and the Church require the sanction and approbation, or at least, the assent of the civil power; and that the Apostolic Constitutions, (Clement XII., Benedict XIV., Pius VII., Leo XII.) condemning secret societies, whether these exact or do not exact an oath of secrecy, and branding with anathema their followers and partisans, have no force in those countries of the world where such associations are tolerated by the civil Government." It is likewise affirmed, "that the excommunications launched by the Council of Trent and the Roman Pontiffs against those who invade and usurp the possessions of the Church and its rights, strive, by confounding the spiritual and temporal orders, to attain solely a mere earthly end; that the Church can decide nothing which may bind the consciences of the faithful in the temporal order of things; that the right of the Church is not competent to restrain with temporal penalties the violators of her laws; and that it is in accordance with the principles of theology and of public law, for the civil Government to appropriate property possessed by the churches, the Religious Orders, and other pious establishments." And they have no shame in avowing openly and publicly the heretical state-